i bought it last month hoping it’d help me customize my sites and blogs – it advertises itself as very simple and user-friendly.

however for a beginner it is anything but.

the first site i’ve migrated from blogger now looks terrible, much, much worse than before, and trying to fix it is glacially slow as i need to mug up on code and search the internet looking for answers to really simple things like how to change the font sizes..

the menu no longer has a “design” element you can click to change the fonts, you have to go into the css (why have they removed this from the menu?).

all in all i am hugely disappointed and wonder if there isn’t better software for a beginner like me, or whether i shall have to pay designers to fix my really simple problems.

Show me what your site looked like before and i will help you make it look the way the want to the best of my ability. Other community members will also help you with styling your site and creating the functions you need.

the old site was an off the shelf blogger design (and it showed) and no longer exists as i migrated it to wordpress.org.

i wanted something that looked more professional but am having a terrible time getting there, because to use genesis, you needs to know code (which isn’t how they advertise it).

the site now looks terrible now for several reasons:

(i) i can’t work out how to reduce the size of the font in the sidebar (the genesis video i saw showed a “design” option in the menu where you could do that but that option no longer exists – for some reason – so you have to know where to go in the code, which i managed to do for the headline and the body copy, but i haven’t yet found out for the sidebar);

(ii) there are lines running across the site – i realize this is probably something i cannot change on this child theme (sample) but it seems absurd to advertise you can customize a site but then you don’t allow something so simple.

there’s lots of other things i want to do but i think i shall have to work out how to fix such really basic things first.

thanks in advance if you can point me in the right direction for any of this.

Post a link to your site Freddie and I’m sure there’ll be lots of people willing to lend a hand. It sounds as if the things you want to do are quite simple (relatively) so it won’t take some of the gurus round here (like Brad) long to get it looking how you want.

– you’re right, i’m looking to do really basic things to tidy it up and make the typeface sizes & colours cohere a bit better, and i guess i was hoping genesis would help me to do that…

i also have other sites/blogs i am migrating over from blogger and wordpress.com, and am planning to launch more in the future – so i was hoping to learn the basics so i could set them up and run them myself – (i am more of a content maker/writer than a designer, obviously…)

You’re welcome. I would recommend you move the code to section 10 of the style.css though (wrt the table of contents at the top of the style.css – you being an author too!), it will save you aggro in the future, and will help you to find code when you need to refer back to it I say this as a repentant coding slob.